Ramaphosa impeaches public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane

Parliament has voted to impeach public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane. And in a highly unusual move, President Cyril Ramaphosa has suspended her. This follows a long, determined campaign by his supporters to remove her from office.

The campaign, or more correctly witch-hunt, did not start within the ANC or government as one would think, but as whisperings in the media about Mkhwebane's alleged wrongdoings. Chief among them was so-called self- and media-styled constitutional expert UCT law professor Pierre de Vos and others, mainly in left-liberal media Daily Maverick and Primedia's Cape Talk/702. It must be said that De Vos, a career academic who never practised law as an attorney or advocate, was reportedly an applicant for the public protector job Mkhwebane got.

Her grevious sin was to have investigated and made findings against former finance minister Pravin Gordhan. It mattered not to the baying mob that members of the public laid the complaints. Even before he won on appeal, the court setting aside Mkhwebane's findings, De Vos et al had already found she was incompetent and acted beyond her authority. The fact that she lost, and later against ABSA and Ramaphosa regarding his alleged dodgy donor funds for his ANC presidential campaign, was proof to them of her allegedly being unfit for office.

They expediently ignored that in the legal world losing in court is normal (see Jacob Zuma's and Vodacom's repeated losses), something De Vos would not understand having never practised as a lawyer. But only with her did it have significance. 

At the time, the public protector's findings including Gordhan and roll-overs from her predecessor had been appealed about five times with a fifty-fifty win/loss ratio. This out of over 20,000 cases annually, the vast majority which are never appealed. So Gordhan's and Ramaphosa's wins, compared to all the public protector's cases, is almost irrelevant.

But this does not matter to Ramaphosa's supporters of which Gordhan is among the chief ones in the ANC. His lynch mob, led by De Vos and Daily Maverick and media opinion makers, choose to forget both Ramaphosa and Gordhan were Zuma praise singers while in Zuma's cabinet.

To them the real and only issue was that Mkhwebane investigated, an offense punishable by personal vilification - most of the attacks against her were very personal - and banishment. And the fact there was no legal mechanism to remove Mkhwebane was beside the point too.

I doubt De Vos and media cabal are directly involved in ANC politics but they are tools, pawns and useful idiots in the party's internal battles. They remind me of Peter Seller's character in the classic comedy The Party who sets off a chain of chaos without even realising it, only to flee unscathed when the fire consumes the house. 

Ramaphosa and his clique must have thanked the heavens for De Vos and media furore that was created. He bided his time and suspended his nemesis even when he has allowed miscreants to remain in office including  cabinthose his cabinet like the police following last year's security bungle that missed riots unseen since apartheid and personal assistant who was implicated in Covid procurement corruption.

Ramaphosa dare not have his own motivations be examined too closely, and his gaggle of giddy fans facilitate him. Like other BEE oligarchs, Ramaphosa is guilty of post-1994 South Africa's original sin: corruption. In fact, that kind of corruption came before and opened the way for the ANC's wholesale theft of the country's assets and resources now called "state capture" that his appointee NPA head Shamila Batohi refuses to prosecute.

Ramaphosa, his in-law Patrice Motsepe and the few others like them had nothing relatively speaking in 1994. But they accepted the devil's favour - bribes or commission if one prefers - from white monopoly capital that controlled the economy to maintain the status quo. Little has changed economically for the country's masses while they achieved unimaginable wealth.

The stigma of wealth gifted and not earned never leaves which is why Russian oligarchs are considered with such suspicion. How much of their wealth was earned through their own efforts, how much was "commissions" and how much was stolen?

Only Ramaphosa's fanatical followers - outside the ANC mostly white middle class and elite who consider him one of them - do not smell the stench, the furtiveness of bribery and betrayal. But they hypocritically declare Zuma was the worst of them all. 

The lynching of Mkhwebane must be seen in this context: to hide, or if all else fails, misdirect attention from the venal man who accepted his thirty pieces while at the dawn of democracy 99% of his race lived in abject poverty, and most still do; to hide that apartheid, although economic apartheid, still exists and its victims - non-whites - and beneficiaries - whites - are still the same. 

The lynching of Mkhwebane is to protect WMC's inside man, Ramaphosa.

This is a separate but concurrent narrative of why there have been no corruption  prosecutions, for example, fake land claims Kevin Bloom wrote about in his blog Our Burning Planet. It's another example, though, of politics and politically connected people getting off Scot free, in the land claims saga a Ramaphosa associated and ANC politician. 

 Which leads to the question why the heads of NPA and SAPS are not fired for dereliction of duty but public protector is. Yet the public protector, whose authority is limited to administrative findings only that have little to no impact beyond government (she can only make recommendations that government can and does ignore) is impeached, spurred on by the anti-liberal Ramphoria brigade. 

By her poor record of failing to prosecute corruption, Batohi ought to be subjected to the same vilification as Busisiwe Mkhwebane. But she won't because she's a Ramphoria. 

This is the kind of double standards and politicking Bloom infers and those who ask rhetorical questions, like CapeTalk's John Maytham (another anti-Mkhwebane who'd prefer she be removed with little legal formality), of why there are no prosecutions choose not to dwell too deeply on. The the difference between Batohi, say, and Mkhwebane is Mkhwebane is effective in investigating complaints but is demionised by woke social justice warriors who have a personal axe to grind.

Other heads of especially justice departments too ought to be impeached for gross incompetence like the Master's Office and Inquest Court, Cape Town's in particular. There are long backlogs at these offices and officers dereliction like my late mother's estate and unnatural cause of death inquest, both of which are still outstanding since 2017/8. Despite the Master's inadequacies being long known, this year deputy justice minister John Jeffery claimed he was surprised by its "inefficiency"!

These are real issues that affect citizens but just as Jeffery ignored (no response) my recent letter complaining about the Master, Court and NPA regarding my mother's cases, there shall be little real change while weak and ineffectual "Watching Paint Dry" Ramaphosa is president and his praise singers in the cabinet, media and elsewhere dominate opinion.